Women in the Bible, the Burqa and Battle

By Rabbi David Eidensohn

            In January-February Orthodox Jewish synagogues read the biblical story of the Bondage and Exodus. Israel was enslaved in Egypt for hundreds of years and left miraculously 3354 years ago. The Egyptians tried to break the spirit of the Jews, but failed. The Talmud attributes this to the women. The Egyptians broke the men, even the rabbis, who decided to stop having children. What is the use, they asked, of having children who are slaves? The women had faith in G-d, and insisted that the Jewish people continue. When the Jews left Egypt, the women attained the great spiritual heights at Sinai. The men, on the other hand, held on only so long, and worshipped the Golden Calf when Moses tarried in heaven. The forty years in the Sinai desert was one when men sinned repeatedly, but not the women. Rabbi Yisroel Salanter, the saint of his stellar nineteenth century generation, prayed for the spirituality of his grandmother.

            It is just as well that women are superior spiritually, because they raise and nurture children. If we have a hope in life, it is our mothers. The Jewish people is almost four thousand years old, and it has a steady tradition, rooted in the wisdom and strength of its women. Jewish woman are not necessarily unique. When Alexis Tocqueville came from France to study America in 1831-32, he wrote the classic "Democracy in America." Tocqueville wrote favorably of the budding giant, and he attributed its strength to "the superiority of their women." Suffrage did not exist in those days, but women in the home were the mainstay of life.

            In the eighties, non-Orthodox Jews were embroiled in the issue of women rabbis. Although my ultra-Orthodox home is far from such matters, I was involved personally with a group of Conservative rabbis who fought for the traditional approach, and I carried the battle into the Sabbath table. I looked around the table and stopped cold. My wife and daughters did not want to hear about women who want to be rabbis. Why?

            A man wants to be a man. A boy wants to be a boy. A woman and girl have their rights, too. Talking to a natural woman about entering a male domain is insulting. Why, then, is America set on turning its women into men? Why do 46% of Americans support drafting women? (Gallup Poll, December 2,001) Why do 52% favor allowing women into frontline combat roles, and 63% favor allowing women into Special Forces? What is wrong with such roles? They are the roles of killers, to put it bluntly. A woman who goes to war must be a killer, which comes naturally to men, but not to women. A woman who has polluted her soul with indifference to death cannot return home and nurture life, at least, not as well as a natural woman. Why does the public want women to become killers? It has nothing to do with ideology, although that is also a factor. It has to do with economics.

            In the past decades real wages have not risen very much, on the other hand, consumption has vastly increased, often doubling. An economist asked how such a thing could be possible. The answer is, today two people earn the wages of one. Yes, consumption has doubled, because instead of the husband supporting the family, the husband and wife support it. Thus, there is money for a double consumption. Even if a husband does support the family, he must take extra jobs, and thus cannot help his wife in her crucial family responsibility.

            A woman, in order to survive, must enter the male world, and she must twist her nature to be a man. She must talk like a man, she must curse like a man, she must be vicious like a man, and she must have a driving instinct to succeed like a man. Such a thing, a former woman, comes home to the children, and we have the results: Children mass-murdering their fellow students in public school. We have a generation of children raised on television, who relish and demand the most hideous videos, beyond pornography into sicky sickness.

            There is more to it than that. From the inception of the secular age, which coincided with the rise of psychoanalysis and secular mental therapy, studies showed that women suffer during sex. Even today, or perhaps, especially today, the numbers are horrendous, some showing eighty percent of women who just cannot enjoy what men do. The reason, a top sexual therapist told me, is because men come on strong, and women are frightened, and fight back. The result is disaster. A major reason for the drive to promote homosexuality is the despair that men and women can enjoy sex together. This is the driving force of the modern science of sexology, which is not science, but an effort to change nature, because secular people, and not just them, but those living in our secular age, commonly experience serious gender problems. The secular age forces a woman to be unnatural, and she takes this fear into the bedroom. For this reason, some women, like Gloria Steinem, promoted Lesbianism, but eventually, at the age of 67, she married a man. So there is a growing movement of women throughout the world to enter deeply religious sects, where they can, behind the long dresses, be secure in natural femininity. Our ultra-Orthodox community is inundated with young women who have been everywhere, seen everything, and want a different lifestyle. One of them came to Rabbinical Court wearing such an outfit that I thought she was making a movie about Medieval nuns.

            Insecure women jeopardize the entire family, of course, because a man without a woman is not going to be happy or natural. Children will be miserable, obviously, and therefore throughout the world men, women and even children flee the Disney world of America to Fundamentalism. The deepest need of a human being is to be natural. Western society denies to a woman the right to be natural, and demands that she be a man. Western civilization points a finger at a man who feels manly, and even denies a boy the right to be a natural boy. A girl, in Western society, is a toy for a frustrated boy, and a woman is a toy for a frustrated man. Everyone is frustrated, and those who haven't fled to the safety of some cave, or somewhere like my community, are going to have an interesting life.

            A Moslem woman explained that wearing a burqa "inside she is free." In a world where men are predators, a woman cannot tolerate the constant sexual demands of male eyes and worse. Every young woman lives in fear. The secular young woman accepts a life where she is free to show everything and be nothing. She is a commodity similar to a video. A man will take her body, heart and soul and spit it out. She will give him every pleasure and he will flush her afterwards with all the respect given to a commode. A woman must have freedom from men. She must be free to appear only at her only volition. She must have a home and family to honor her dignity. Only then is she free to be a woman.

            We are raising women to deny natural femininity and forcing them to be men. Logically, a male-female should be in the army. Why, however, should she be a male-female when she is not?